JERUSALEM — After coordination with Israel and the United States, Egypt has sent a shipment of weapons and ammunition into the Gaza Strip to forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, Israeli officials said Thursday.

port. Abu Rudeineh called it Israeli propaganda aimed at aggravating the situation between Fatah and Hamas.

But Israeli officials knowledgeable about the shipment confirmed a report in the daily Haaretz that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert approved the shipment in his meeting Saturday evening with Abbas.

They said four trucks with 2,000 automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips and 2 million bullets had passed from Egypt through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing, where Gaza, Israel and Egypt meet. The shipment was turned over to Abbas Presidential Guard at the Karni crossing between Gaza and Israel, officials said.

Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a Cabinet member and former defense minister, told Israeli Army Radio that the weapons were intended to give Abbas the capability to hold his own against those organizations that are trying to spoil everything.

That was an apparent reference to the militant Hamas faction, which gained control of the Palestinian government by winning parliamentary elections in January. Hamas refuses to recognize Israels right to exist and rejects previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements that call for a permanent two-state solution.

American officials were circumspect but said various moves to support Abbas forces were taking place, including securing money for training the Presidential Guard and Israeli approval for the return to the Palestinian territories of a group of a thousand or so well-trained but aging Fatah fighters, the Badr Brigade of the Palestine Liberation Organization. They have been barred from returning and are living in Jordan.

The Bush administration is seeking congressional support for up to $100 million, mostly for salaries and training, to strengthen Abbas and his security forces and extend their control over the Gaza crossing points.

A senior American official who deals with the Palestinians insisted that the point was not to promote civil war with Hamas, but to help Abbas and Fatah and to provide deterrence and balance in Gaza, where Hamas is especially strong.

The arms shipment is part of a broader American and Israeli effort, in coordination with moderate Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to strengthen Abbas, weaken Hamas and show some movement on the stalled issue of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

At the meeting Saturday, Olmert also promised to eliminate some West Bank checkpoints and turn over to Abbas

$100 million of the roughly $500 million that the Israelis have collected for the Palestinians but have refused to turn over since Hamas took power.

But officials involved consider their efforts something short of a plan. That, they say, is because Fatah remains weak, Abbas is unpredictable and too wedded to the Fatah old guard, and conditions are not ripe for a major effort to reach a comprehensive settlement.

Still, the officials say, given the problems of the region — the American difficulties in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran, Israels summer war with Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas sway over Gaza — efforts are needed to alter the status quo and promote moderate Palestinian political goals.

The most important thing for us is to get a process going between Abbas and the Israelis, the American official said.

If the Palestinians end up with a consensus supporting Hamas, you push off any real peace process for a long, long time. If they opt for this kind of unity, fine, but then there is nothing we can do for them, and there will be no Palestinian state, and its not a good outcome.

Abbas has called for early presidential and parliamentary elections, which Hamas opposes. The Americans were pleased by his call, though they would have liked him to have confronted Hamas six months ago, the official said.

The longer that goes by, the harder it is for him, the official said. Weve been trying to explain to him that every option is risky now but that the status quo also has its downside. Doing nothing and getting weaker does not help.

The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, in essence has been suggesting talks with Abbas that would result in a Palestinian state with temporary borders — effectively the second stage of the moribund peace plan known as the road map — with Israel pulling back in the West Bank to the current route of the separation barrier it is building there.

In an interview in Haaretzs weekend magazine, she talked gingerly about a detailed operative plan to negotiate with Abbas, ideas she has discussed with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Abbas aides. My vision says that the two-nation-state principle is not only an Israeli gift to the Palestinians but advances Israeli interests, she said.

Olmert does not like grandstanding by his Cabinet ministers, and some aides were dismissive about the notion of a new plan. But Olmert largely shares Livnis thesis: that Israel, the West and moderate Arab countries want Abbas and Fatah, whatever their weaknesses, to win out over Hamas, a Foreign Ministry official said.

So they should have guns, and resources for patronage, and there should be a political vision and framework for moving forward, so that if Palestinians do choose the right path, there is something real and tangible for those who believe in a two-state solution, the official said.

Abbas has repeatedly rejected the idea of a Palestinian state in temporary borders, seeing it as a trap, because there would be no guarantee that Israel would move further toward a final settlement.

But its possible that now Palestinian moderates need some political ammunition to show people that negotiations will bear real and tangible results, the official said. We need to strengthen the political horizon that Palestinian moderates can offer.

Then, he suggested, with such results in hand and a period of visible reform in Fatah, new elections could result in Hamas defeat, and then a stronger move to dismantle Palestinian militant organizations — as called for in the first stage of the road map, which did not foresee one of those organizations, Hamas, running the Palestinian Authority.

Theres no perfect solution now, but how can we move in the right direction, he said, with a weak Israeli government, a weak Palestinian president and Hamas in power?

There are many difficulties with such a course of action, beginning with the refusal of Hamas to sanction early elections and the risk that Abbas continues to be seen by too many Palestinians as an agent of Israeli and American interests.

Abbas is committed to a Palestinian state on roughly the pre-1967 borders, with its capital in Jerusalem, and a just solution to the refugee issue. So approving the current West Bank barrier route, which keeps 10 percent of the land, including East Jerusalem, on the Israeli side, even as a temporary border would be very risky for him.

Abbas has got a lot of work to do — in Fatah, in his own office, with the security forces, the American official said. Well continue to help, he added, pointing to a likely visit next month by Rice. But Abbas has to make some choices.

Olmert is already facing criticism from his right wing for his concessions to Abbas, given the involvement of Fatah militants like Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades in firing rockets into Israel. Israeli opinion, after the summer war and the Gaza rockets, is generally opposed to handing back large portions of the West Bank to the Palestinians, especially given the chaos in the Palestinian Authority. And Olmert would find it difficult to skip over the first stage of the road map, which calls for the Palestinians to dismantle terrorist organizations.

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